People: Former Los Alamos Lab Chief Scientist Named Gordon Conferences' New Director, AAAS Honors Public Health Advocates; People Briefs: Shing-Tung Yau, Carold Hall, Jan Visser, Susan Kemnitzer; Obituary

Former Los Alamos Lab Chief Scientist Named Gordon Conferences' New Director AAAS Honors Public Health Advocates People Briefs Obituary - Arthur C. Giese Date: March 7, 1994, pp.22 Carl Storm, former chief scientist and program manager for technology development at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Explosives Technology and Application Division Office, has assumed the position of director of the Gordon Research Conferences. Storm, 59, succeeded Alexander Cruickshank, who had held the position since 1968. Storm began his new job on December 1. Founded in 1931, the Gordon Research Conferences is a Rhode Island-based organization that sponsors meetings exploring topics at the frontiers of chemistry, physics, and the biological sciences. Convened in New England, California, Hawaii, and Europe, the conferences attract approximately 15,000 scientists worldwide and are characterized by a casual, off-the-record environment. Attendance at the individual Gordon conferences is limited to small groups of 100 to 130 scientists (J. Seiken, The Scientist, April 29, 1991, page 19). Storm, himself a regular participant in past Gordon Research Conferences, says his first priority is to sustain "the traditional high quality of the conference. Ever since I took this job, people have communicated to me how much of an impact the conference has had on them." He also plans to work with the conferences' board of trustees to develop a "globalizing" of future gatherings. Storm envisions a situation in which conference sites would alternate between the United States and Europe in successive years, creating, he says, "a more international participation of scientists." Storm earned a doctorate in organic and biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1965. From 1968 to 1985, he served on the faculty at Howard University, where he taught and conducted research under the sponsorship of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Petroleum Research Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as the Office of Naval Research. --Craig Montesano June Osborn, a professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at the University of Michigan, and Mathilde Krim, founding co- chairwoman of the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), have received the 1994 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The awards were presented February 21, in conjunction with AAAS's annual meeting in San Francisco. Osborn was dean of Michigan's School of Public Health from 1984 to 1993 and served as associate dean of the Graduate School for Biological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1975 to 1984. She was recognized by AAAS for her efforts in the areas of scientific research, medical practice, public health, and health-care policy issues. During the early 1980s, Osborn was one of the first scientists in the United States to publicly decry hatred and discrimination against people with AIDS. Her role as chairwoman of the National Commission on AIDS and her past leadership of a National Institutes of Health advisory board on policies regarding HIV are credited with setting a new standard in AIDS advocacy and public health policy. Commenting on receiving the award, Osborn says she is "pleased that AAAS has recognized the AIDS epidemic as a very important area of scientific responsibility." Krim, an adjunct professor of public health at Columbia University since 1990, was cited for her efforts to change the public's perceptions about AIDS and generating private support for AIDS research and prevention. In 1983, she established the AIDS Medical Foundation, the first private organization to foster and support AIDS research. The organization, which changed its name to AmFAR in 1985, has given $65 million to 1,300 projects in basic AIDS-related scientific and psychosocial research, community- based clinical research programs, and AIDS prevention projects. Krim says she finds the honor "particularly meaningful" because it comes from the scientific community. "I hope it encourages scientists to become involved in the field, because it has great humanitarian value," she says. Shing-Tung Yau, a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, and Simon Donaldson, a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, were named winners of the 1993 Crafoord Prize. The prize, accompanied by a cash award of $300,000, is presented by the Royal Swedish Academy in disciplines considered ineligible for Nobel Prize contention. Yau was honored for contributions in the investigation of black holes through differential geometry, the study of curved lines, surfaces, and their properties. Donaldson was cited for his work in four-dimensional geometry. Yau, who received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, has been on the Harvard faculty since 1987. Previously, he had been a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, from 1984 to 1987, as well as at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., from 1979 to 1984. Donaldson, who has been Wallis Professor of Mathematics at Oxford since 1985, was a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1983 and 1984. From 1983 to 1985, he was a junior research fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. He received his M.A. from Oxford in 1984. Carol Hall, a professor of chemical engineering at North Carolina State University, and Susan Kemnitzer, deputy director of the division of engineering education and centers at the National Science Foundation, are recipients of Tulane University's 1994 Newcomb Lectureships for Renowned Women in Chemical Engineering. The lectureships, presented annually by Tulane since 1991, acknowledge women who have made notable contributions in chemical engineering and related fields, and are given at the university. Kemnitzer presented her lecture, entitled "Changing America: The New Face of Science and Technology," last fall. Hall's lecture, to be given on April 7, is entitled "Toward a New Equation State for Hydrocarbons and Polymers." Kim O'Connor, an assistant professor in the department of chemical engineering at Tulane and founder of the lectureships, says that, in addition to their contributions to the betterment of conditions for women in science, Hall and Kemnitzer "have professional credentials that stand on their own in taking leadership roles in chemical engineering and related topics." Hall, cited for her "innovative research in statistical thermodynamics," received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1973. She was an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Princeton University from 1977 to 1985, as well as a staff member in the corporate economics department of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., from 1976 to 1977. Kemnitzer served as executive director of the Congressional Task Force on Women, Minorities, and the Handicapped in Science and Technology from 1987 to 1990, as director of the legislative policy group at NSF from 1981 to 1987, and as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior from 1987 to 1981. She was honored for her work "to improve the quality of engineering education in the nation." O'Connor says that Kemnitzer has also been instrumental in efforts to "enlarge minority and handicapped populations in the fields of science and technology." Past recipients of the lectureship include Martha Farmer, manager of product development at Baxter Healthcare Corp. in Deerfield, Ill.; Alice Gast, associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University; Mary Good, undersecretary of technology at the Department of Commerce; and Linda Wang, a professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University. Jan Visser, former head of the department of medical pathology at the Medical Biology Laboratory TNO, the Netherlands, has been named to direct the newly established Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute of the New York Blood Center. Visser will direct the laboratory's basic research into the nature and functions of hematopoietic stem cells--the "master cells" that give rise to all other blood cells--and will investigate the clinical uses and potential gene therapy applications of stem cells in cancer treatment. A stem cell biologist for 17 years, Visser is the European editor of the journal Cytometry and a member of the editorial boards of Experimental Hematology and the Journal of Immunological Methods. He is also the secretary of the European Stem Cell Club and the incoming president of the International Society of Experimental Hematology. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1975. Arthur C. Giese, a professor, emeritus, of biological sciences at Stanford University, died January 1 at Stanford Hospital after suffering a heart attack. He was 89 years old. Giese was an authority on marine invertebrate biology, cell physiology, and protozoology. At the time of his death, Giese was completing the seventh edition of his textbook Cell Physiology (Philadelphia, W.B. Saunders Co.), first published in 1959. Although Giese retired from the Stanford faculty in 1970, he maintained a full-time, active career until his death. Giese managed to continue working despite having his leg and pelvis broken in 13 places after being struck by a car in 1981. A native of Chicago, Giese earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago in 1927. He came to Stanford in 1929 to complete doctoral work and joined the faculty in 1933. Giese was noted for the depth of his concern for both graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford. Former Stanford president Donald Kennedy, in a written statement read at a memorial service, recounted how Giese would photograph, interview, and evaluate each of his 160 students over the course of a year in a cell physiology class. Wrote Kennedy, "I doubt if many Stanford faculty members have written, over the years, as many recommendations to medical and graduate schools as he."

People: Former Los Alamos Lab Chief Scientist Named Gordon Conferences' New Director, AAAS Honors Public Health Advocates; People Briefs: Shing-Tung Yau, Carold Hall, Jan Visser, Susan Kemnitzer; Obituary

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